If you feel lost in life, read this

Look, feeling lost is normal.

Even the most successful people in the world and those who you think “have it all figured out” feel lost at times.

However, that doesn’t mean it’s not a problem or something we should just ignore.

In fact, it’s the opposite.

If you feel lost you NEED to solve it because feeling lost eventually leads to your life feeling meaningless - and what is a life without meaning?

Feeling lost is shit. We’ve all been there and know what it’s like.

So how can you stop feeling lost?

Well, to truly solve any problem, you need to know the cause and address it head on.

And there are a few reasons you feel lost:

1. You see so many different paths and options with the internet and social media that you get pulled from your own path

2. You haven’t sat down to figure out where it is you want to go

3. You don’t commit to doing something daily to keep you on track

4. You work and work but see little progress due to the microscopic, yet compounding, nature compounding really has.

So what’s the solution?

Step 1: Create your own direction.

You can’t be surprised if you feel lost if you’ve never sat down to figure out where you want to go.

So set a damn goal.

Step 2: Create a damn vision that you can come back to.

In this vision, describe exactly how you want your life to look and who you want to become - but write about it as if you already are that person.

Read this every morning and every night to keep your direction centred in your mind.

Step 3: Start as you mean to go on

Make the first thing you do each day (after reading the document you made in step 2) be focused work toward making that vision and your goal reality.

It doesn’t matter how much direction you have, if you never work towards it you’ll still feel lost.

Step 4: Lean into it

Don’t apologise or lean away from obsessing over it.

Allow yourself to be pulled in.

Allow yourself to follow your curiosities.

Allow yourself to spend hours working if you want to.

Allow yourself to spend hours reading books and listening to podcasts about it.

Your direction (goals and vision) should take over your life - don’t apologise for it.

Step 5: Understand the long-term nature of progress

To make progress, you have to create value through the work.

But to create good enough work that is valuable enough to create progress, you need to have enough knowledge, skill and understanding.

These 3 things take time to build.

Hence, when you’re starting out, you don’t have much knowledge, skill and understanding and so your work is crap and progress is slow.

But as time goes on, your levels increase, your work improves and your progress gets better.

And this compounds.

You see, imagine you read a book.

In that book, you might only learn 1 thing, but that 1 thing has now impacted the lens through which you view every single thing in your life (even if it’s only by a tiny amount) and in turn, it’s impacted your entire life.

That new bit of knowledge creates tiny ripples in your decisions and actions that when extrapolated over years mean reading that 1 book changed your life, however, you have to give it time and you have to do the work.

The same goes for everything you do that builds your knowledge, skill and understanding (especially the work as it’s the only thing that builds all 3 areas at once - eg. reading doesn’t build skill, only knowledge and understanding).

Progress takes time, and so when we don’t see it, it’s easy to feel lost.

But realise the progress you’re making is microscopic. It’s tiny, but compounding.

You won’t see how much progress you’ve made until you look back in 6 months time.

Understand this;

You don’t feel lost because there’s something fundamentally wrong with you.

You feel lost because you’re human and you’ve been pulled from your path.

Follow these steps anytime you feel lost. Remind yourself of your goal, read your vision and do the work.

— Ross

PS: If you struggle to do the work, it’s because you don’t have mastery of yourself.

Click here to achieve Self-Mastery, build your discipline and become all you could be.